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To Terezín and Back: Czech Jews and Their Bonds of Belonging Between

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To Terezín and Back: Czech Jews and Their Bonds of Belonging Between This article was downloaded by: [University of Warwick] On: 09 March 2014, At: 01:52 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdap20 To Terezín and Back Again: Czech Jews and their Bonds of Belonging from Deportations to the Postwar Anna Hájkováa a Department of History, University of Warwick, Humanities Building, University Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, England Published online: 06 Mar 2014. To cite this article: Anna Hájková (2014) To Terezín and Back Again: Czech Jews and their Bonds of Belonging from Deportations to the Postwar, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 28:1, 38-55, DOI: 10.1080/23256249.2014.881594 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2014.881594 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2014 Vol. 28, No. 1, 38–55, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2014.881594 To Terezín and Back Again: Czech Jews and their Bonds of Belonging from Deportations to the Postwar Anna Hájková Department of History, University of Warwick, Humanities Building, University Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, England (Received January 2013; accepted April 2013) What was Jewish belonging in Central Europe, and how was it influenced by the Holocaust? This article examines the ways in which Czech Jews negotiated their bonds with Jewishness immediately before, during and after the Second World War. Building on a theoretical framework of affiliation developed by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, the essay portrays the differentiation among the Czech Jews in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto. Much of the ideological differences between the groups of Czech Jews were informed by access to resources and also emotional ties which played a key role in the menacing environment surrounding them. Rather than producing common Jewishness, Terezín generated differences. In the immediate postwar, ties to Jewishness were arbitrary and often accidental, only rarely corresponding with one’s previous affinities. The article argues that group belonging is situational and contingent on the social space. Keywords: Holocaust; Czechoslovakia; identity; Jewish history; Zionism; Theresienstadt How did Czech Jews grapple with questions of their Jewishness during the Holocaust and the early postwar period? How did their self-understanding change as they faced deportation to a forced community that was entirely Jewish? What role did Judaism play in early postwar years as the survivors struggled to rebuild their lives? Why did some survivors decide to leave Czecho- slovakia after the war, while others stayed behind? Unlike German, Polish, Slovak or Hungarian Jews, almost all of the Czech Jews who experienced the Holocaust were shipped to the transit Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 01:52 09 March 2014 ghetto Terezín and spent some time there. Their comparable war experience makes the Czech Jews a suitable group to examine the ways in which they came to understand their Jewishness during and after the war. In this essay, I offer a window into the social, political and cultural loyalties of Czech Jews by presenting a deconstructivist take on the concept of ‘identity’. I examine their bonds of belonging during a span of time of six to nine years, between their deportation and when they settled down after the war, from 1941/1942 to 1948/1950. Examining these two periods together allows one to determine the many factors behind the formation of their identity and to show that their Jewish- ness was situational. Because these two periods were consecutive and because the groups of people I write about were identical, or very similar, in both phases, I can point out the influence of structural, material and ideological factors in the genesis of the ways in which Czech Jews understood their relationship with Jewishness. © 2014 The Institute for Holocaust Research, at the University of Haifa Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 39 Scholarship of Czech Jewry has not analyzed the war in the context of the postwar.1 Such a chronologization implies that what happened during the Holocaust was a different story and that postwar Czech Jews were a disparate kind of people. Although a sizeable segment of what became postwar Czech Jews were former Slovak, Hungarian and Carpatho-Russian Jews who had moved westwards, many, indeed a majority, of Czech Jews were people who had lived in Cze- choslovakia before 1945. Moreover, comparing the social, cultural and gender histories of the Czech Jews before, during and after the war helps us recognize lasting factors and continuities and, equally importantly, lack thereof. I argue that we should understand the changing factors behind the way in which Czech Jews understood their Jewishness not as a reason to break the chron- ology, but as a rationale to reconsider the nature of the bonds of belonging among Czech Jews. The central category of analysis for this undertaking would traditionally be ‘identity’.2 Yet iden- tity has various meanings, which denote very diverging matters. ‘Identity’ denotes both the external and internal ascriptions of self. It describes how one feels subjectively, how the individual relates to his or her group, and how the society, state and institutions perceive the individual, all at the same time. The quality of what we would call ‘Jewish identity’ depends on the meaning that is at play. In order to grasp the factors behind its emergence, we must disentangle this term. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have pointed out the constructedness of ‘identity’,a concept that both scholars and popular opinion like to see as axiomatic.3 They have suggested an analytical breakdown of ‘identity’ into several sub-categories.4 The first sub-category includes identification and categorization, which describes the state and institutional perception of people. Categorization is a symbolic, yet powerful force of the state as well as organizational work that enables bureaucracies, schools and institutions to function. The second sub-category covers social location and self-understanding. Social location describes the sense of self, where one ‘is’, i.e. one’s position on the social field, per sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Self- understanding, how one sees who one is, can change over time. Both social location and self- understanding are internal, subjective and individual perceptions of self. The third and last group of categories is commonality, connectedness and groupness. This is the emotionally charged sense of belonging to a distinctive group, involving both a felt solidarity or oneness with fellow group members and a felt difference from specified outsiders. While commonality describes sharing an attribute with others, and connectedness is a relational link to others, group- ness surpasses both previous categories and frequently refers to a national sense of self. When a diffuse self-understanding as a member of a particular nation crystallizes into a strongly bounded sense of groupness, this is likely to depend not on relational connectedness, but rather on a power- fully imagined and strongly felt commonality, Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl, as defined by Max Weber. Although these differentiations may appear at a first look cumbersome, they are indispen- Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 01:52 09 March 2014 sable for an analytic approach to grasp the loyalties, self-understanding and networks of Czech Jews. 1This lacuna stands in contrast with the historiography of East European Jewry; see Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); idem, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006); Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944-48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2For example, Livia Rothkirchen, Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln, Nebraska & Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press & Yad Vashem, 2005), 20 and the overall conceptualization in Kateřina Čapková, Češi, Němci, Židé? Národní identita židů v Čechách,
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